Archive for the ‘Author Commentaries’ category

It often happens when I write a chapter — and this was an example — that I have what looks like a pretty solid structure, but as I write it out I become aware that something isn’t working. If the problem’s obvious, then I fix it. If not? I tend to find the best thing […]

So I managed to get another chapter up last night, which makes two in a week. I’m hoping to continue to be able to continue with one chapter a week; it feels good. That is, above and beyond feeling good to be able to write fiction again, and feeling good because I’m moving the story […]

I wrote a bit the other day about how I used the ‘random article’ feature of Wikipedia to inspire names for the various dungeon levels in Fell Gard. More and more I’m finding it useful as a source for inspiration for other names and ideas. Even if sometimes I have to go pretty far afield […]

One new thing I added to the revision of Fell Gard is a set of names for the various levels of the dungeon. Or, more precisely, I added the idea that the levels have names. I haven’t given each of the names, but added a couple where they seemed appropriate. I’ll get to a full […]

After having written all that I did about the aleatory process of Fell Gard, one last thought struck me. That is this: every writer builds (or grows, pick your metaphor) a story out of their life experience. That experience comes in many forms — things that happen to the writer personally, things they hear about, […]

I thought I’d wrap up this series of posts with a few reflections on what the aleatory process is giving me. How’s it working out, now that I’ve written nearly 300 000 words and mapped out a couple hundred rooms of dungeon?

Last time out, I wrote about how some of the odd ways probability works tends to produce results from the dice that one would not intuitively expect. This time I want to write about what it feels like to be looking at those results.

Having discussed my methods of dice-rolling and how they work with the Fell Gard story, I want to conclude with a few thoughts on what the whole thing feels like. To get there, it’s worth going through a note or two about probability.

Having written these past few days about how the dice shape the dungeon, I want to talk a bit today about how I cheat. I don’t cheat lightly. But it does sometimes happen that the dice seem to be telling me that a room overlaps space already occupied by another room. At that point, I’ll […]